What are solid state drives? Disk speed characteristics

Almost every user has already heard about solid-state drives, and some even use them. However, not many people have thought about how these drives differ from each other and why SSD is better than HDD. Today we will tell you what the difference is and conduct a small comparative analysis.

The scope of application of solid-state drives is expanding every year. Nowadays SSDs can be found almost everywhere, from laptops to servers. The reason for this high speed and reliability. But, let's talk about everything in order, so first let's see what the difference is between a magnetic drive and a solid-state drive.

By and large, the main difference lies in the way the data is stored. Thus, HDD uses a magnetic method, that is, data is written to the disk by magnetizing its areas. In an SSD, all information is recorded in a special type of memory, which is presented in the form of microcircuits.

Features of the HDD device

If you look at magnetic hard disk (MDD) from the inside, it is a device that consists of several disks, read/write heads and an electric drive that rotates the disks and moves the heads. That is, the MZD is in many ways similar to a vinyl record player. Read/write speed modern devices can reach from 60 to 100 MB/s (depending on the model and manufacturer). And the rotation speed of disks usually varies from 5 to 7 thousand revolutions per minute, and in some models the rotation speed reaches 10 thousand. Based on the special device, there are three main disadvantages and only two advantages over SSDs.

Noise that comes from electric motors and rotation of disks;
The read and write speed is comparatively low because certain time spend money on positioning heads;
High probability of mechanical breakdowns.

Relatively low price per 1 GB;
Large data storage capacity.

Features of the SSD device

The design of a solid-state drive is fundamentally different from magnetic drives. There are no moving parts, that is, there are no electric motors, moving heads or rotating disks. And all this thanks to a completely new way of storing data. Currently, there are several types of memory that are used in SSDs. They also have two interfaces for connecting to a computer - SATA and ePCI. For the SATA type, the read/write speed can reach up to 600 MB/s, while in the case of ePCI it can range from 600 MB/s to 1 GB/s. An SSD drive is needed in a computer precisely for faster reading and writing of information from the disk and back.

Due to their design, SSDs have many more advantages over MZDs, but they are not without their disadvantages.

No noise;
High read/write speed;
Less susceptible to mechanical breakdowns.

High cost per 1 GB.

A little more comparison

Now that we have understood the main features of the disks, we will continue our comparative analysis further. Externally, SSD and MZD are also different. Again, due to their features, magnetic drives are much larger and thicker (if you don’t take into account those for laptops), while SSDs are comparable in size to hard drives for laptops. Also, solid state drives consume several times less energy.

To summarize our comparison, below is a table where you can see the differences between the disks in numbers.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that SSDs are better than MZDs in almost all respects, they also have a couple of disadvantages. Namely, this is volume and cost. If we talk about volume, then at present solid-state drives are significantly inferior to magnetic drives. Magnetic disks also benefit in cost because they are cheaper.

Well, now you know what the main differences between different types drives, so all that remains is to decide what is better and more rational to use - HDD or SSD.

The abbreviation SSD stands for "Solid- State Drive", which roughly translates as a solid-state drive or drive.

We will, of course, look at the main characteristics of such devices in this article, but I would like to do this based on a real example. Such a case recently, very opportunely, presented itself to me, since my worker hard the disk began to show clear signs of dying (a wedge appeared, which manifested itself in the spontaneous freezing of the entire system, accompanied by a characteristic click).

It so happened that our company (for testing) bought one SSD drive (also known as a solid-state drive) hard drive) and, for the reason stated above, it ended up with me! :)

Well, it would be a sin not to take advantage of such a moment and not spend comparative testing this SSD hard drive and its predecessors, designed on the basis of .

We unpacked the new product, our entire IT department huddled around it :)

From the markings on the box it follows that this is a solid-state drive from Plextor, with a capacity of 64 gigabytes, equipped with an external SATA connection interface and a maximum transfer speed of 6Gb/s (gigabits per second). This will be somewhere around the theoretical maximum of the third generation SATA interface (600 megabytes per second).

Remember what we talked about interface speeds and their history in?

Form factor of our solid state drive as can be seen from its size and the inscription on the box - 2.5 inches. That is, it can be installed with equal success on both desktop computers and laptops. More expensive models come complete with a special mount that allows you to install the device in 3.5-inch bays. In our case, the kit only includes sealed plastic packaging :)

Here are a couple of photos so you can estimate the size of the SSD hard drive:

It is a little less than a centimeter thick. And here - in comparison with a “regular” hard drive:

Moreover, the mass of an SSD is absolutely not comparable to its “bigger” brother. Compared to him, he is a piece of fluff. After all, there are no moving mechanical parts that need to be protected from external influences, which means there is no point in making a thick metal base case. The outer covering is aluminum and plastic, so the weight is appropriate: 75 grams. The device supply voltage is five volts.

Estimated time trouble-free operation(according to the manufacturer) is 1,500,000 hours, and the period official guarantee indicated on the box is three years. From which we can conclude that the drive must be quite reliable. Is this really true? Time will show:)

It is not a rewarding task to talk about value in such a rapidly changing market as the market information technology, but at the time of writing this article, the price this decision was around eighty dollars.

In general, what is essentially a solid-state SSD drive? This - large flash drive(equipped with a high-speed SATA interface) with quick access, a cache of a certain amount and a specialized data transmission and processing controller responsible for optimal performance carrier.

A solid state drive (Solid State Drive), unlike an HDD (Hard Disk Drive), has a number of obvious advantages (along with implicit disadvantages), but first things first. Let's start with something pleasant :)

SSD hard drives are characterized by:

short access time to data (regardless of its fragmentation and location)
the same speed for any sampling sequence, since the organization of information storage here is a matrix of flash memory cells from which sampling occurs.
absence of moving parts, which means complete absence of noise
resistance to various vibrations and physical impacts
smaller (relatively HDD drives up to 30%) energy consumption

This is what the SSD disk looks like when disassembled:

At the top left is the microcircuit RAM(DDR3), which is the drive cache, and on the right is the device control controller “ Western Digital" Below are eight fast NAND flash memory chips (eight gigabytes each), which together make up the total capacity of this solid-state drive - 64 gigabytes.

Here is another photo to consolidate the image, so to speak :)

Let's say a few words about the memory chip itself. This is not exactly a cache, more precisely, it caches (remembers) data, but not at all to speed up the operation of the device, and information about allocation tables and erased/occupied cells is dynamically recorded here. The addresses of worn-out flash memory cells, where recording can no longer be carried out, are also recorded here.

Now, as for the controller: it main task(as we already mentioned) - providing read and write operations, but it is also responsible for managing the data layout structure. Using his wear control tables, he “looks” at which cells have already been recorded and which have not yet been recorded and equalizes these indicators.

Thus, the controller provides maximum long term service of our SSD drive, causing its cells to wear out evenly. Therefore, a properly programmed and configured controller can significantly change both individual speed indicators and the durability of the device as a whole.

So, let's continue the review! On the back of the box of our solid-state SSD drive we found an interesting table from the point of view of information content:

Which useful information can we learn from here? Firstly: an indication of the size of the memory chip (cache) of the disk. We see that for models with a capacity of 64 gigabytes it is equal to 128 megabytes, for a capacity of 128 gigabytes it is 256 megabytes and for 256 gigabytes it is 512 megabytes of ultra-fast RAM, which is used for the needs of the media itself.

The “Performance” section shows us the linear (sequential) speed value reading from a solid state drive - “Read Speed” (520 megabytes per second) and speed records to disk “Write Speed” (90, 200 and 390 megabytes per second for different SSD capacities, respectively).

Also pay attention to the interesting inscription at the very bottom, which indicates that in the ATTO Disk and Crystal Disk Mark performance determination programs (benchmarks), the disk subsystem shows best index productivity.

Let's test this moment! And let's start with the CrystalDiskMark program.

But first, a little background. The point is that for more full testing I collected (connected) a small collection of hard drives on my work computer, which, by a happy coincidence, were within my reach and it would be a shame not to “drive” them :)

So, the following people take part in our testing:

solid state hard SSD Plextor 64Gb M5S SATA drive - new
Seagate Barracuda capacity of one terabyte SATA 7200 rpm - practically new
Western Digital 320 Gb IDE 7200 rpm - new

Note: abbreviation RPM stands for (round per minute - revolutions per minute) and characterizes the speed of rotation spindle rigid disk. In general, the more, the better. The standard values are 5400 and 7200 rpm. There are high-speed devices with speeds of 10,000 and 15,000 rpm, but they are extremely expensive and are not used in home or office computers.

As you can see, the company we selected was very worthy. Discs are not worn out. And I specifically wanted to test drives with different data transfer interfaces. Remember what we talked about working with in a separate article?

Testing an SSD drive

So, let's start our testing using CrystalDiskMark.

We launch the program and see this simple window:

The photo above already shows the results of testing our SSD drive. Let's use them to look at the interface of this simple but useful program.

In the upper left corner there is a button labeled “All”, clicking on which starts the testing procedure. To the right of it is a drop-down list through which we can specify the number of “passes” of the test before displaying the final result. The default value here is “5”. Next - size test file, which will be written to disk. It is based on the results of its recording that the program will judge the linear (sequential) speeds of write and read operations on the media. Even further to the right is a list from which you can select the hard drive itself that we will test.

As you can see, my SSD drive acts as a system partition (drive “C”).

So, we figured out the main parameters. Now let's look at the results themselves. We have two columns here: “ Read MB/s"(reading speed, megabytes per second), " Write MB/s"(write speed, megabytes per second).

According to the first line, as we can see, our solid-state drive produced 237 megabytes per second (for reading) and 102 megabytes per second (for writing). This is for a file of 100 megabytes. The second and third lines show speeds when working with small pieces of data (512 and 4 kilobytes, respectively). The general principle here is this: the more files and the more smaller size each of them, the more time the hard drive needs for any operations on them.

Let's remember (write down) these values and select another drive (E) for testing. I will have it SATA hard drive one terabyte in volume. And here are the results he showed:

As you can see, they are an order of magnitude lower than those of an SSD hard drive, but they are also not very bad!

Now let's see what our third participant will show - a 320 GB hard drive with an IDE interface?

You can compare the results obtained with each other and draw conclusions based on them. You can also download “Crystal Disk Mark” from our website and conduct the test yourself on your system, comparing its results with those that I received.

I would like to immediately bring to your attention another program that is designed specifically for measuring the speed of SSD drives. It has several more useful functions in its arsenal. Let's take a closer look at it:

The photo above shows the results of my disk test for reading (Read) and writing (Write). Notice the highlighted area at the top left. Here we can see the firmware version (firmware) of the controller - 1.00 and check whether our operating system Aligned (marked) the solid state drive? If there is “OK” here, then everything is fine.

The “Access Time” field shows us the time spent by the device to access the requested data. The “Score” line displays the overall summary of the measurement results. The so-called "parrots". Remember how in the cartoon? :)

The program can build us a graph for clarity. To do this, go to the “Tools” menu and select “Compression-Benchmark”.

After this, the following window will open:

In it we will need to click the “Start” button and wait for the end of the graph construction procedure. If you want you can download this utility.

Well? Does God love a trinity? :) I can’t help but introduce you to another wonderful program for testing and obtaining comprehensive information about data storage devices installed in your computer. The program is called “HD Tune Pro” and is also remarkable because it has a Russified interface, so working with it is a pleasure.

This is what one of its tabs looks like with a benchmark (performance assessment) of the disk system:

The photo above shows the test results of my Plextor SSD. What is good about this particular program? The fact that it shows not only numerical values, but also draws us a graph in real time, according to which we can judge changes in certain parameters in dynamics and observe some trend. We will see this clearly in the following screenshots.

What do we see here? Maximum, minimum and average reading speed values (we obtained similar values in the previous test). New parameter- disk access time and load percentage. There is a separate switch for measuring the speed of reading and writing to the disk.

Well, let's compare the performance with our terabyte SATA drive:

As you can see, the difference is obvious! Particularly interesting is the graph that shows the difference in reading speed at the beginning of the disk and closer to its end (process dynamics). If we look at the graph of a solid-state SSD drive, we will see that its “cardiogram” is almost flat and there are no drops in speed.

Also pay attention to such a function as the hard drive temperature indicator, available in this program for HDD drives.

So, let's explore our "dinosaur" from Western Digital :)

As expected, the main indicators are much more modest, but I was surprised by the stability of the reading speed over almost the entire surface of the disk. Only at the very end did it noticeably decrease. Also here we see the lowest CPU load among all our test subjects.

Let's move on to the next tab of the HD Tune Pro program, which is called "Random Access". The photo below shows the number of I/O operations our SSD produces per second for data blocks different sizes(IOPS - Input Output Per Second), average and maximum data access time and their reading speed.

Let's look at the results of the hard drive from Seagate (Seagate 1 terabyte):

Do you see how big a difference there is in the results? Let's see what Western Digital will demonstrate (320 GB IDE):

You can see everything for yourself. In general, the HD Tune Pro program is very good and useful. In addition to the “benchmarks” themselves, she can show us our drive (they are located on the “Health” tab). You can also enable real-time disk monitoring and scan the drive surface for the presence of (bad blocks).

You can conduct your own testing of this program or compare it with my indicators.

Let's look at another tab of the program - "File Benchmark". The principle of its operation is somewhat similar to that used in “CrystalDiskMark”, which we discussed in the middle of the article.

The test is launched by pressing the “Start” button, but before that you can configure its parameters: select the device that we will test, indicate the size of the file to be written to the disk and what type of data will it contain?

On the left we see the already familiar graph-cardiogram of work, and below are reading and writing speed indicators, as well as the number of I/O operations performed by the drive.

Let's compare the graph above, which was for an SSD hard drive with our terabyte capacity:

Below is our “WD”.

Here, I think, there is nothing unexpected and this drive legitimately takes its honorable third place :) The winner, by all indicators, is unconditionally the SSD solid-state drive from Plextor.

Since the article turned out to be quite voluminous, I decided to break it into two parts and talk about the disadvantages and general principles of operation solid state drives, designed on the basis of flash memory, and your subjective feelings from using such a device, talk in, which will soon appear on our website.

A short video about how SSD drives are produced:

Solid state drives (SSDs) have appeared on the market for a long time, but they are gaining more and more popularity in lately. SSD drives are quite expensive, but they greatly improve system performance due to their very high speed of reading and writing data.

Unlike usual hard drives here instead of magnetic tracks it is used new technology- flash memory. But in addition to the great advantage in performance, there are several more disadvantages here - these are service lines, small volume and high price. In this article we will try to figure out how to choose an SSD drive for a computer, and also look at what they are and how they differ from each other. But first you need to find out what SSD drives are.

SSD or Solid State Drive is a storage device without moving elements based on memory chips or in other words, a solid state drive.

A typical hard drive consists of a rotating high speed magnetic disk and heads for reading and writing data. Data storage is performed by magnetizing and demagnetizing the desired cells. But working with the cell, changing the disk rotation speed, and most importantly, moving the recording head takes too much time. Therefore, the hard drive cannot be very fast.

But an SSD drive solves this problem. Here, instead of this whole complex mechanism, flash memory is used. Thanks to this, there is no longer any need to move the recording head; recording to any point on the disk is instantaneous.

But chip-based memory technology is more expensive than conventional hard drives. In addition, flash memory has one very undesirable property - a limited number of rewrites. Therefore, manufacturers have to come up with different ways of cell placement and compensation to ensure that their drives last as long as possible.

So that you can choose the right ssd drive for your computer, you first need to consider what types of drives exist.

Types of SSD drives

During the development of this technology, several SSD types disks, they differ in size, method of connection to the computer, operating speed and method of placing memory cells.

Dimensions and connection methods

Size, method SSD connections drive to the motherboard and operating speed are related, because these characteristics depend specifically on the connection interface. Let's look at the most common ways to connect an SSD so that you know which ssd to choose:

SATA- these SSD drives connect to the same interface as regular ones HDD drives. To be compatible with the installation space, these drives have a housing measuring 9x7x2.5 centimeters, which corresponds to the size of the HDD. Nowadays, they are used most often because they can be easily installed in any computer or laptop instead of a regular hard drive. But this option has a limitation - maximum speed data transfer - 6 Gb/second. For an HDD this is a very large figure, but some SSDs can develop even more.
mSATA- exactly the same connection interface as SATA, and therefore the same operating speed. Only there is not such a large building here. This type of SSD is often used for laptops. The only difference between this type of disk is the size.
PCIe- these discs look like regular ones PCI cards and thanks to the use of this interface they can achieve data transfer speeds of up to 30 Gb/sec. But they can only be used in personal computers due to their size, and also cost two or even three times more than regular SATA SSDs.
NVMe- PCIe modification SSD drives, which gives even greater productivity thanks to special optimizations, but on at the moment it is only compatible with new motherboards. The case looks exactly the same as the PCIe one.
M.2. is a smaller version of an SSD drive for PCI. It works according to the same protocol and allows you to develop the same speed of working with data, but instead of a large case it is made in the form of one small fee. Majority modern boards already support slots of this type, but they can also be connected simply via PCI.

Methods for organizing memory cells

By way of organizing cells SSD memory Drives are divided by the number of bits that are stored in one cell. In fact, the less, the greater the rewrite resource and the speed of operation, but at the same time the higher the price. Therefore, manufacturers are trying to reduce the cost of production by increasing the amount of data in one cell. Currently there are the following types of memory:

SLC NAND- This type of memory was developed quite a long time ago. One cell contains one bit of data. He guarantees maximum performance and up to ten thousand data overwrites, but is very expensive and therefore not released.
MLC NAND is the next generation of flash memory, in which there are two bits per cell. The number of possible rewrites is reduced to three thousand times, and the operating speed is halved. But the price of such devices is already more or less acceptable.
TLC NAND- in this standard, one cell already contains 3 bits of data and the rewriting resource drops to 1000. But they are even cheaper. Manufacturers have found a way out of the situation by adding various balancing controllers, which replace the failed cells with reserve ones, and also try to give the same load to all cells. A cache from SLC memory is also used. All this allows us to guarantee the operation of the SSD for up to 3 years or more.

Nowadays TLC and MLC with various optimizations are most often used.

How to choose an SSD drive?

Now that you already know what SSD drives are, let's look at how to choose an SSD drive for your computer. New users only pay attention to volume, price and size. But you also need to take into account the type of memory placement, connection method and controller manufacturer.

SSD memory capacity

The larger the size, the higher the price of the device, but at the same time, the greater the rewriting resource, because the controller has more space to redistribute the load between all cells. Most often, SSD drives come in sizes of 128, 256 GB and 1 TB. Most often, users take a 128 GB SSD for the system.

Connection method

There are actually only two ways to connect: using SATA interface and PCI. SATA is more common and versatile. This SSD drive can be installed in both a computer and a laptop. But if you want very high speed, it is better to choose the PCI interface.

Memory type

To find out which ssd is better to choose 2016 for your computer, you need to pay attention to the type of memory. The first type of memory, SLC, is no longer available. There are two types common in the market - MLC and TLC. The first is more expensive, but has a recording resource of 3,000 thousand times, and the speed of working with data is 50 milliseconds. Such disks normal use can last 5-7 years, but are more expensive.

Disks using TLC memory, have a write resource of 1000 times, 75 milliseconds read time and about three to five years service life. For a home computer, it is quite possible to choose TLC memory. But if you copy very often large files, then it is better to choose MLC.

Chip manufacturer

There is another very important parameter, which is worth paying attention to. This is the manufacturer of the controller chip. On the one hand, it may seem that this does not matter, but each manufacturer has its own characteristics and disadvantages.

SandForce- This is one of the most popular controllers. It is quite cheap and has good performance. The main feature is the use of compression when writing data to the media. But there is a drawback - when the disk is full, the recording speed drops significantly;
Marvel- similar to SandForce, has excellent operating speed, but it no longer depends on the disk full percentage. Disadvantage - too expensive;
Samsung- also quite popular controllers. Have support AES encryption at the hardware level, but sometimes you can observe a decrease in speed due to problems with the garbage collection algorithm;
Fizon- has excellent performance, a low price and the absence of any problems that would reduce speed. But there is a drawback here. He performed poorly in operations with arbitrary recording and reading;
Intel- better than Fizon, but much more expensive.

The main manufacturers of memory boards are Samsung, SanDisk, Intel and Toshiba. But memory boards are not that different, so of great importance There is no choice of board manufacturer.

Good afternoon, dear readers of my blog site! Today I will tell you all about solid-state SSD drives, which I use with pleasure myself and recommend this miracle modern technology to you! Over the years, it has become commonplace that all information on laptop computer stored on HDD - hard disk drive. The Winchester seems very reliable, roomy, and truly eternal. But now a solid state drive is becoming more common - an ssd hard drive based on memory chips.

What is a solid state drive?

Not everyone knows what kind of animal this is, and why many developers system administrators and simply advanced users sing the praises of the small device.

Such drives are based on two types of memory:

flush;
like an operational one.

Inside the SSD drive there is a controller for control; the device has no moving parts. Some say that this is like a large flash drive, which is not far from the truth.

The small size allows the devices to be used in compact devices: laptops, netbooks, smartphones, tablets.

How does the drive work?

If you compare an SSD hard drive with something, you can give the way a hard drive works. It first calculates where the desired sector with information is located, then moves the moving block of magnetic heads onto the track. Like a hunter is waiting patiently( Of course, the speeds are high, but the wait can be noticeable), when the desired sector gets to the place above the magnetic head. Finally, the HDD reads and displays the information. The more chaotic requests ( with a difference of a second, request files from sectors of drive D, and immediately decide to read system data from C), the slower the “broom” works. The heads are constantly “rushing” around areas of the disk, which slows down work.

But a laptop SSD works on a different principle: this “real estate” simply calculates the address the desired block with information (it is unique and recognizable), gets access directly for reading or writing. There is no movement of the drive parts relative to each other. The higher the speed of flash memory, controller and external interface, the faster the data will be on the desktop. And the computer is much quieter and 10 times faster. Everyone has probably heard the annoying sound when the computer is working hard, like someone moving stones in search of the necessary information? This is the HDD, and since the solid-state device has nothing to move, everything happens quietly, like a spy.

But if you need to change something in the data or completely delete it, the SSD does not work so easily. NAND chips are designed to perform operations strictly by sector. Flash memory is written in blocks of 4 kilobytes and erased in blocks of 512 kilobytes.

Therefore, the device has to do the following work:

The block containing the section to be modified is read. Transfers it to the internal clipboard;
Changes the required bytes, erases a block in the memory chip;
Determines the new position of the block (necessarily corresponds to the mixing algorithm);
Hurray - the block is written to a new location, and the SSD hard drive is sent to “rest”.
Benefits and disadvantages of SSD drive

Naturally, such devices have both pros and cons. Let's start, of course, with the pleasant:

high speed of reading a data block, which does not depend on where it is physically located. This is as much as 200 Mb/s or more;
low power consumption, approximately 1 Watt lower than that of HDD;
low heat generation, even Intel confirmed this. Studies have shown that an SSD hard drive heats up 12 degrees less than usual. Of course, throwing magnetic heads is a rather intense mechanical action;
benchmarking revealed that a solid-state drive with 1 GB of memory can work just as efficiently, not inferior to models with a 4 gigabyte HDD;
They work very quietly and rarely break down;
When optimized, they are perfectly compatible with Windows XP / 7.

The disadvantages are the following:

power consumption increases greatly with increasing storage capacity, when writing entire blocks of information;
low capacity at high price. This is when compared with HDD;
the number of write cycles is limited.

As they say, think for yourself, decide for yourself which is better - hdd or ssd. Most devices are already equipped with solid-state devices, so it is not advisable to disassemble them. But sometimes the hard drive can be replaced. The question is, what exactly is important: the absence of noise, energy consumption or the speed of the computer?

My personal experience with an SSD drive

About a year ago I bought myself an SSD drive from OCZ Vertex for 60 GB with a speed of 430MB/s, I installed only the system on it, and used a regular HDD as storage various information. I strongly advise everyone to do the same, because the performance of my computer based on an i3 processor has increased not by 2 or 3 times, but by about 10 times! Of course, for high-quality operation of the system on an SSD drive, you must first configure the system itself (if you have Windows XP, remove it and forget it, and install Windows 7 or 8). I’ll tell you how to do this later.

Setting up and optimizing SSD for Windows 7/8

What settings are we talking about and why do them? — I answer: If you don’t make these settings, your drive will fail in 1-2, since, unlike a regular HDD, it has a limited number of write cycles (about 10,000 thousand), this is the main disadvantage today, but correct use he will work for you for 4-5 years! It has been working for me for 2 years now and everything is great!

Tip: Don't listen to those who tell you to find one for your solid state new firmware and update it! It works great from the factory. All you need to do is configure the system!

Let's start setting up:

Step 1.

After you have connected the drive and are going to install the system on it, do 2 important steps:

Disconnect other hard drives to avoid problems with installing the system, I had a case when I installed the system and I had boot partition The system was created on a regular HDD and I was wondering why the system still boots as if nothing had been changed!
And second, go into the BIOS and install it on the connector where the solid state drive is connected AHCI mode, if your motherboard was purchased after 2011-2012, most likely this mode will be set for you automatically.

Step 2.

When you partition the disk, leave 10-15% of the total volume of the disk untouched; over time, the disk wears out and takes clusters from this unallocated space.

Now let's optimize:

Step 1.

Must be disabled system cache Prefetch and Superfetch. They are not needed when SSD operation drive. In most cases, Prefetch is disabled automatically by the system, but I recommend checking it:

Let's open the registry editor(press the Windows key combination + R and write in run: Regedit)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager-> Memory Management -> PrefetchParameters

Install - EnablePrefetcher = dword:00000000

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager -> Memory Management -> PrefetchParameters

Install -EnableSuperfetch =dword:0000000

Step 2.

Let's disable automatic file defragmentation. We don't need it, it only reduces the resource of the SSD drive. ( Only forWindows 7, inWindows 8 does not have this function, it is already used for other functions, and Windows 8 already works fine withSSD without any optimizations)

Click Start >> in the search field enter - Defragmentation. Click on the “Set up schedule” button and uncheck the “Run according to schedule” checkbox.

Step 3.

Perhaps you have a 64-bit operating system and more than 8GB of RAM, then I recommend disabling the page file. Let's go:

Computer -> Properties -> Additional options systems -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual memory-> Change. Install - Without swap file

Step 4.

You need to change the Memory Management parameter:

Go to the registry editor Start >> run >> regedit

And the second way to open the registry is to press the Windows + R key combination and write Regedit in Execute

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager -> Memory Management

Install -DisablePagingExecutive =dword:00000001

Step 5.

You can also turn off logging during the SSD optimization process. file system NTFS

Go to Start again > type in the search bar > > click on the program icon with the RIGHT mouse button and select > Run as administrator.

In the window command line enter: fsutil usn deletejournal /D C:

Step 6

Despite the fact that using SSD drive your computer will boot very quickly, you need to disable sleep mode.

In the already open command line window, enter: powercfg -h off and press ENTER.

Let’s also disable solid state indexing:

Again > Start >> Computer >> click on system disk (usually the system drive letter isC) right click and select properties, then uncheck the option "Allow the contents of files on this drive to be indexed in addition to the file properties"

Step 7

Go to Computer >> (right click) Properties >> Advanced system settings >> Advanced >> Environment Variables.

Let's enter a new address for variable environments TEMP and TMP, placing them on the second hard drive.

Step 8

And finally last step SSD optimization, move the user’s folders (Video, Music, Documents, Downloads) to HDD hard disk.

We create in advance on hard HDD folder, now it will contain the user's libraries.

Right-click on all folders whose location we want to change. On the Location tab >> click the “Move” button. Then we transfer it to the HDD to the newly created folder.

That's all, now I think you understand that there is nothing complicated, configure, optimize, SSD for any Windows be it 7 or 8.